Another weekend story from the united press service of the courts of St. Petersburg: a resident of St. Petersburg named Vladimir Alekseevich Viking applied for a name change – he wanted to become Eric Norton…
The soulless bureaucracy did not support such a desire. The registry office of the Moskovskiy district refused the applicant’s request, arguing that in this case, the Russian citizen Eric Norton would not have a middle name, which, according to the registry office, is not provided for by Russian law. The man with an official “refusal” logically went to court (which, by the way, in such cases is quite normal, and in the case of a positive decision, the name could well have been changed).
An administrative claim was filed with the requirement to recognize the refusal of the registry office as unlawful. And yet the court denied citizen Viking in his dispute with the state institution. The court noted that the absence of a patronymic is allowed in Russia if it is based on a national custom – and, apparently, the plaintiff could not prove this.
Meanwhile, according to the St. Petersburg Civil Registry Office, in 2020, 3689 applicants managed to change their name.